JUST when it seemed that after three decades of murder and mayhem Northern Ireland was in sight of peace comes a new outrage to plunge it back into the dark age of sectarian hatred and violence.

The death threat against Neil Lennon, the captain of the province's international soccer side, may not have - yet - caused death or injury.

But in one way it was deadlier than the car bomb or the assassin's bullet.

For it had seemed that sport was a shining exception in a province in which every other aspect of public life had been stained and bloodied by the war between Protestant and Catholic.

On the soccer field as in the athletics stadium Catholic and Protestant had been allowed to compete side by side for the honour and pride of wearing their green shirts. In that, sport made a unique contribution to the province's fragile unity.

Rugby union has taken the process a step further. It is about the only activity where a united Ireland competes as whole, where southern as well as northern Catholics can line up alongside northern Protestants.

They become close enough to make friends and to confirm to each other that whichever side of the religious divide you were born, you share a common humanity. You work, love, marry and have children like everyone else.

Now with a willful and self-defeating myopia, the protestant extremists who sent the death threat to Lennon have poisoned even that small well of hope.

In the sick minds of the terrorists who threatened him, Lennon's crime is two-fold. Firstly, he had the unforgivable effrontery to be born a Catholic. Secondly, he opted to play for the Glasgow side Celtic which, because it is supported by the province's Catholics, has become a symbol of Northern Ireland's polluting sectarianism.

The suggestion has been made that the death threat was a hoax. But the hounding of Neil Lennon by blindly partisan protestant mobs has been going on for many months.

In February last year, shortly after his move to Celtic from Leicester City in the English Premier League, a hard-core minority of fans booed his every touch when he played for Northern Ireland against Norway.

Shortly after that, graffiti appeared on Belfast walls showing the words, "Neil Lennon R.I.P" alongside the drawing of a hanged man.

It was a bitter personal blow for Lennon that the threat came on the night he was due to captain his country for the first time in the friendly against Cyprus in Belfast.

But the blow to Northern Ireland's hopes of at last resolving the hatreds tearing it apart is much more significant.

Nobody can now blame Lennon for saying he will never play for his country again.

If there are small signs of hope to be gathered from the incident they come in the universal revulsion expressed by the vast majority of the Northern Irish people. There was a weariness in the voices of those inter-viewed on television who spoke eloquently of their anger and despair.

But the reaction of the province's officialdom was not so reassuring. Why, for example, did the Northern Ireland FA not call off the match after the death threat was received?

And why, when their sport is clearly sick with sectarianism, did the men who run Glasgow's Protestant football side Rangers, change the colour of their away strip to orange, a colour irrevocably associated with militant Protestantism? It is, at the very least, crassly insensitive.

The vast majority of Northern Ireland's people, yearning for peace and a hopeful future, are not just in thrall to sick-minded extremists.